All single tickets are $35 each. Subscription prices are significantly discounted. After online payment is complete, tickets are held at Will Call. You may also download a PDF order form to pay by check.

All concerts are Friday at 8:00 pm

COMING UP NEXT

Violinist Glenn Dicterow

October 16Qty:
Promo Code:

2015 – 2016 SEASON OPENER

October 16 at 8pm
The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s
With Violinist Glenn DicterowJim Lathers Memorial Fund Concert

Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2

Mozart: Symphony No. 29 in A major

Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite

Our season opener is the first concert underwritten by the Lathers Memorial Fund, and we are thrilled to present violinist Glenn Dicterow. In his 30 year tenure as Concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Dicterow was featured on numerous New York Philharmonic tours and “Live from Lincoln Center” broadcasts. He will perform the exciting Second Violin Concerto by Prokofiev.

Mozart was just 18 when he wrote the A major symphony, but had already found his unique voice. Musicologist Stanley Sadie calls it, “a landmark ... personal in tone, individual in its combination of an intimate, chamber music style with a still fiery and impulsive manner.” Featured throughout the movie “Amadeus,” the symphony displays the unique blend of joyfulness and quiet melancholy that is so indicative of Mozart’s music.

The Pulcinella Suite arises from the 1919 inspiration of Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, to create a ballet based on the ageless, improvised Italian street entertainment known as the commedia dell’arte. For the music, Diaghilev chose Russian composer Igor Stravinsky with whom he had collaborated on some of his most famous modernist works — The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. But for this project Stravinsky had to reinvent himself as a Classicist, which he did brilliantly, with charming tunes and jaunty dance rhythms.

Jim Lathers Memorial Fund
Jim Lathers was a member of the Chamber Orchestra and a wonderful friend to many of our musicians. A first-rate clarinetist and one of the most prolific “doublers” in town, Jim played all of the saxes, plus flute, oboe, English horn and a few musical oddities like the basset horn and Heckelphone.
Jim died of cancer at the age of 65 in 2013, and made bequests to 20 arts and educational organizations including KUSC-FM, the Pacific Symphony, the University of Wisconsin and St. Matthew’s Music Guild. The Guild’s Board of Directors has established a Jim Lathers Memorial Fund and written an Investment Policy and guidelines for distributing proceeds from its investment portfolio.
The Lathers Memorial Fund enhances the Music Guild Endowment Fund that was established several years ago by an anonymous donor.
For information on the Music Guild Endowment Fund and Board policies regarding bequests, please contact President Fred Doering, fdoering@charter.net.

Jo-Michael Scheibe

November 6 at 8pm
Combined Chamber Singers and Concert Choir
of the USC Thornton School of Music
Jo-Michael Scheibe and Cristian Grases, conductors

Tedesco: Romanesca Guitano

Van: Night Sings to Morning (West Coast Premiere)

Van: Three Poems of William Blake

Beck: Songs of Exultation for Double Choir

USC’s Chamber Singers and Concert Choir return following their electrifying performance in March 2013.
The choirs will present a wide range of choral works, from magnificent pieces in the tradition of the multiple-choir masterpieces that Giovanni Gabrielli composed in the 16th century for the soaring spaces of the Basilica of St. Mark’s in Venice to intimate works for chamber choir and guitar by Tedesco and Jeffrey Van.

Cristian Grases

November 6Qty:
Promo Code:

The St. Matthew's pipe organ.

December 11 at 8pm
The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s with the Choir and Soloists of St. Matthew’s Church
Thomas Neenan, Music Director

Vivaldi: Gloria

Handel: Organ Concerto in B-flat and “Hallelujah” Chorus sing-along

Buxtehude: Schlagt, Künstler! Die Pauken und Saiten

Our Annual Holiday Concert always sells out. This year, in addition to the “Hallelujah” Chorus sing-along, we offer one of Handel’s popular organ concertos. Handel played the concertos as intermission entertainment during performances of his oratorios. The full resources of the chamber orchestra will be matched by the church’s impressive Pardee Memorial Organ.

While Antonio Vivaldi was maestro di cappella at one of Venice’s large orphanages for girls, he wrote hundreds of violin concertos and other orchestral works. However his Gloria, written in 1715 for chamber orchestra and chorus, remains one of his best known and beloved works.

Dietrich Buxtehude, the most important German composer in the generation before Bach, wrote vivacious and charming choral music, including his festive cantata “Artists, Strike the Timpani and the Harp.”

Thomas Neenan, Music Director

December 11Qty:
Promo Code:

Scott Pauley, Patricia Halverson, and Andrew Fouts

January 22 at 8pm
Chatham Baroque – A Mediterranean Odyssey

Chatham Baroque returns to St. Matthew’s with an exciting mix of French, Italian, and Spanish music. Recognized as one of the leading proponents of early music, their wonderful interpretations have always been a favorite.

The program includes French dances by Jean Baptiste Lully, composer to King Louis XIV, Vivaldi’s famous “La Follia,” and Chatham Baroque’s own arrangements of popular dances from Spain and Latin America.

Chatham Baroque’s core ensemble will be joined by Baroque violinist Adriane Post and percussionist Danny Mallon.

This concert is made possible by a generous grant from the Edwin W. Pauley Foundation.

January 22Qty:
Promo Code:

Trafalgar Square

February 26 at 8pm
Baroque and Beyond – Extravagant Music
from Venice, Leipzig and London

Eight of Los Angeles’s finest choral singers come together with instrumental virtuosi for a program of music by Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and Janequin, plus 20th century masters Benjamin Britten, John Tavener, and Gerald Finzi

Imagine yourself in Venice, c. 1620. The Doge’s Palace looms beyond the Basilica of St. Mark’s and the famed bell tower known as the campanile. The music of Gabrieli and Monteverdi wafts onto the piazza from inside the basilica and mixes with the calls of the street vendors and the thousands of pigeons that inhabit the place. Suddenly, you are transported to London’s Trafalgar Square, in the year 2005. More pigeons, more street cries. This time they mix with the sacred harmonies of Britten and Tavener lofting from the nearby St. Martin in the Fields.

February 26Qty:
Promo Code:

Oboist Phil Feather

April 8Qty:
Promo Code:

April 8 at 8pm
The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s
with Oboist Phil Feather

Albinoni: Oboe Concerto

Turina: La Oración del Torero

Mendelssohn: Octet

Tomaso Albinoni, an Italian contemporary of J.S. Bach, probably did not compose the piece for which he is best known, the Adagio in G minor.
No matter; we will use this famed “Albinoni Adagio” as the second movement for his accredited Oboe Concerto a delightful work full of Baroque rhythmic élan and charming tunes.

Joachín Turina composed his gorgeous Toreador’s Prayer in 1924 and it has remained a staple of concert programs in Spain ever since. Far from a stodgy or doleful meditation, Turina borrows the impressionistic colors of French composers Debussy and Ravel and marries them to the harmonies and dance rhythms of Iberia. ¡Olé!

Before he composed the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture – which established him as the greatest musical prodigy of all time – Mendelssohn composed an equally impressive masterpiece, the Octet in E-flat. The Octet is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest pieces of chamber music in the repertoire. Never mind that Mendelssohn was only 16 when he wrote it.

Chamber Orchestra Principal Oboe Phil Feather is one of the most highly respected freelance classical and jazz woodwind players in Los Angeles. His Motion Picture, Sound Recording and TV credits number in the many hundreds. Phil has performed with numerous local, national and international orchestras and jazz bands and is on the faculty of Cal-State Los Angeles.

Matthew Brown

May 6Qty:
Promo Code:

May 6 at 8pm
Music for the Great Outdoors from the
Enchanted Forest to Chautauqua

Geminiani: Enchanted Forest

Brahms: Serenade No. 1

O’Reilly: Chautauqua Suite (world premiere performance)

Brown: Commissioned Work (world premiere performance, made possible by the St. Matthew’s Music Guild and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission)

Francesco Geminiani studied violin with Corelli and composing with Scarlatti – not bad credentials. His charming music for a staged pantomime, The Enchanted Forest, was presented in Paris at the Tuileries palace in 1754.

John O’Reilly’s new composition, titled ­“Chautauqua West,” traces the history of the Chautauqua movement from its New York roots to Pacific Palisades. The work is scored for the winds and percussion sections of the orchestra.

Brahms’s two Serenades show the composer at his most tuneful and lyrical. The Serenade No. 1 was composed while he was working on the First Piano Concerto. Unlike the concerto, the Serenade is light-hearted in tone, very much cast in the mold of Mozart’s serenades for evening festivities in a Viennese garden.

Matthew Brown, one of L.A.’s most talented young composers, is composing the sixth work supported in part by the Music Guild’s grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission to cultivate new works by young local composers.

Violinist Yi-Huan Zhao

June 10Qty:
Promo Code:

June 10 at 8pm
The Chamber Orchestra at St. Matthew’s
with Violinist Yi-Huan Zhao, The Choir and
Soloists of St. Matthew’s Church

Mozart: Violin Concerto No. 4

Mozart: Requiem in D minor

Our season finale is a celebration of Mozart featuring his final masterpiece, the Requiem in D minor. Incomplete at the time of Mozart’s tragic death at the age of 35, the work is full of drama and passion.

The text of the heart-wrenching Lacrimosa, quite possibly the last music Mozart ever wrote, begins “Full of tears, that day shall be.” A lament for Mozart, it is nevertheless full of musical beauty and lyricism. The Requiem is an inspired and profoundly moving work.

Mozart composed the great D major violin concerto in 1775 at the age of 19. It is a charming and sunny work with virtuosic writing for the solo violin and charming tunefulness in the accompanying orchestra.